Rightly or wrongly many corporations and recruitment agencies use social media platforms as a form of employee vetting. The Facebook sites and Twitter posts of potential workers are scoured for indications of anti-social behaviour. But just how effective is social media at predicting personality type? Well, the London-based Online Privacy Foundation has been conducting research into that very question. We discuss their findings with the Foundation’s co-founder Chris Sumner.

Transcript

Antony Funnell: Rightly or wrongly many corporations and recruitment agencies use social media platforms as a form of employee vetting. The Facebook sites and Twitter posts of potential workers are scoured for indications of anti-social behaviour. Many people worry about that practice and its accuracy. Just how effective is studying a person's social media activity as a gauge for determining their personality type?

Well, the London-based Online Privacy Foundation has been conducting research into that very question. They recently did a study of Twitter users, and their research suggests that in up to 70% of cases it is possible to identify personality types, at least at the more extreme end of the spectrum.

So, if that's the case, should those recruitment agencies currently engaged in cyber-vetting now be rubbing their hands together in quiet contentment? That's the question I put to the Online Privacy Foundation's co-founder Chris Sumner.

Chris Sumner: I think it would depend on whether they cared about or whether they had a problem with incorrectly labelling people who may not have the personality trait, if you like, or the behaviour that they are looking to avoid. That's really the problem here, is that you might be able to increase or decrease the chances of hiring somebody who is maybe more aggressive or less conscientious. But you've also got a great deal of the population that you're going to be lumping in with the category of people that you want to avoid hiring who are actually probably very good hires indeed.

Antony Funnell: So the risk of mislabelling that 30% is too great.

Chris Sumner: In my opinion and the opinion of our organisation, that risk is too great, and I think it leads on to a number of interesting questions about should we be doing that, is it an unfair invasion of privacy, do we understand the context in which people are using Twitter. Also, this is an early research study. There are maybe eight papers in total that we've been able to identify that look at actual prediction of personality based on social media, and eight papers is really not sufficient to base a decision on that which is going to affect the life of somebody in employment, for example.

Antony Funnell: But you could imagine that employers and recruitment companies would be excited by these findings, wouldn't they.

Chris Sumner: I couldn't really comment on whether they would, but it would certainly be a way, if people really wanted to avoid the possibility of hiring somebody who is maybe more aggressive rather than less aggressive in their personality traits, it would be a much better than the toss of a coin, that's for sure.

Antony Funnell: And what sort of personality traits were we then taking into account with this study?

Chris Sumner: In this study we looked at Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy, which are often referred to as the dark triad of personality. These are really traits that centre on callousness, a lack of empathy, and these people can be quite cunning and manipulative and very impulsive. And, at least in the case of psychopathy, can also at the higher ends be quite violent and aggressive.

Antony Funnell: And what about the fact that people online often adopt different personalities or different ways of interacting depending on what platform they are using. The way of displaying themselves or interacting on Twitter might be different from the way they conduct themselves on Facebook, say. How should we factor in that with this sort of research?

Chris Sumner: Yes, there is literature on that that shows that some people can behave quite differently in different contexts. So people can behave differently on the telephone or they can behave differently on social media. Some people can behave differently on Twitter than they do on Facebook, for example, as well, and also differently in all of those mediums to how they are not just in real life but then in their professional lives, if you like. So people can often put on their work face, if you like, and be quite different in work than they are with their families and friends. So that really would need to be factored in, which is another reason why we should be very, very cautious about seeing this sort of research being used by employers to justify their decisions.

On the other hand, if employers are looking at reducing the risks of hiring people who display certain personality traits more than others and that they are happy ethically and morally with ignoring people who are, if you like, innocent victims of the prediction, then it would present better odds to them than flipping a coin.

Antony Funnell: How did the results from this study compare with a similar study you did into personality traits and Facebook?

Chris Sumner: We found similar correlations in terms of the language that people were using on Twitter and on Facebook and how that related to certainly the trait of agreeableness. So agreeableness is often how friendly, nice, trusting somebody is. So we saw interesting relationships there between these dark triad traits, which are generally linked to people who are lower in agreeableness, so people who are less friendly, maybe more out for themselves.

So we are able to at least do a mapping from the results of our previous study on the big five and Facebook versus what we did on Twitter. So where we saw people swearing a lot on Twitter, that was related to people scoring higher in the traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, and also scoring lower in agreeableness. So we saw that demonstrated on Facebook. And if we look at other research by other researchers, professors and institutions, we're seeing similar trends emerge, certainly with swearing, words related to anger and negative and positive emotion. So all of the research right now is pointing in the same direction in terms of the sort of language people are using on social media versus their personality.

Antony Funnell: And of course there's an enormous reminder here, isn't there, once again about the dangers of putting too much personal information online, of not understanding who could possibly be seeing what you're writing or the way in which you're corresponding.

Chris Sumner: Yes, and people are going to have different views as well based on their own beliefs and personality. So some people may be a lot more open to people talking in a certain way than other people. So it's not just how you're interacting and what that says about your personality but also how the person viewing what you're saying looks at what you're saying and how that reflects to them. So there's another dimension there as well which is pretty interesting.

Antony Funnell: Chris Sumner from the Online Privacy Foundation based in London. And we didn't really have time to get into all the details of the research undertaken by Chris and his team. If you are interested in finding out more, fear not, there is a link on our website.

That's it for another week of Future Tense. Next week, asteroid mining. Think of it as the bookend to our recent program on interstellar flight.